Web Push Notifications for Content Sites: What, Why & How

December 8, 2016
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If you run a content site, you might be looking to increase the traffic to your website. Current algorithm changes with Facebook have impacted the organic traffic from social channels, and the ad blockers have impacted the ad revenue for content sites.

Web Push Notifications, which is a newly launched channel can increase traffic by 30 to 40% to your content websites. Your customers are looking for fresh content on your site, and want to be alerted when you publish them, and not have to check your site daily if there is fresh content or not. Notifications are a suitable mechanism to accomplish that.

What is Browser Push Notification?

Mobile Apps have used notifications to increase user engagement and now the same technology is available in browsers as well. You send an alert to a user sharing important updates with your consumer, like payment reminders, price drop alerts, coupon codes, breaking news, crickets scores, etc. and this brings back the user to your website. The website comes to the user for the important things and makes the experience superior for your customer. Another key point is that the notification is sent to the user when he is online in his browser and he may not be present in your website.

With Chrome announcing its support for Push Notificationsin April 2015, and Firefox in Jan 2016, this became available in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, which represents 70% + market share of browsers. You can check your own analytics data but the majority of your users are available to be re-engaged through this channel.

Why Browser Push Notifications?

You get several visitors to your site, and you want to increase your repeat users to benefit the most from a new user acquisition. Engagement is a key focus metric for several sites, and it increases the lifetime value of your customer, thus allowing you more room in your paid acquisition.

In terms of available re-engagement tactics, usually you would consider:

Email lists – Gather email subscribers on your website and later send them emails to engage with them.

Re-targeting – Pixel the user when he visits your site and retarget him on various search and social platforms.

Now you have 3rd option of Browser Push Notification which has a higher efficiency over Email, and much cheaper than re-targeting. We gathered data for several push notifications send through our platform PushEngage, and saw that the Click Rates for Browser Push Notifications varied between 5 to 30%, and was 2x to 10x higher than Email. We calculate Click Rate as # Click/Subscribers Notification or Email is sent.We compared the cost of Browser Push Notification channel against Retargeting and found that the Cost per click was only $0.002, which was at least 10x lower than any possible retargeting for any sector out there. The below calculation assumed that site uses the $29 plan with 10,000 Push Notification subscribers:

If we haven’t convinced you enough here are 3 more reasons why you should consider using Browser Push Notification with PushEngage on your site:

Send notifications in mobile, without owning a mobile app

It is evident that world is moving towards mobile. For companies to survive they should have a strong mobile strategy. This leads to many marketers as well as bloggers to build mobile oriented campaigns and tools to support it.The increase in number of mobile addicts give rise to mobile website and mobile apps. Personalization via mobile apps generates more revenue according to business.Now some of those benefits are available to you even without spending resources on your mobile app. You can use a platform for Browser Push Notifications like Pushengage, helps you to send mobile notifications to your subscribers without owing a mobile app. Now you can send mobile notifications to your users to convert subscribers in a single click option displayed in your website.

The Easier, Faster way to build your Marketing List

Growing marketing list is the primary strategy of any online marketing. Certainly bloggers are adding contacts regularly to keep the list fresh. By offering freebies like ebook and inviting audiences for unavoidable webinar, bloggers find their unique growth approach.Browser Push Notification platform like PushEngage is a handy tool for every blogger to grow the marketing list very quickly and very easily. PushEngage offers a single tap subscribe option to HTTP sites and HTTPS sites equally, and simplifies the customer experience. The less steps you have in the process, the less friction you will have, which increase the subscriber conversion rate. In terms of opt-in rates, since this is a one click optin, we see much higher optin rates. As compared to your email optin rate you could see upto 50 to 100% higher optin rate than email subscription rate.With PushEngage, users can subscribe in one click and not need to share any personal information. They will receive the notifications from the favorite websites on their browsers.

Blogging is one of the most recommended methods for business/individual to engage with customers. The continuous practice of blogging helps you to get clear on the ideal audience you want to reach and the community you want to build.

From small websites to fortune 500, companies are building strong online presence with refreshing content. It is one of the cost-effective strategies which will reap benefits for long time.

However, a successful blogging not only requires an amazing content, but reaching the readers in more sophisticated way. In this post, you will learn how a browser based push notifications helps you to reach your audience in much simpler way and ultimately make your lives easier.

PushEngage Offers a WordPress Plugin, that automatically sends out a notification when a new post is published. For non-WordPress blogs, we offer a RSS based automation where we send out an push notification automatically, based on new posts published to your RSS feed. This is a great value add for bloggers as now they dont need to spend time in manually sending push notifications.

How to Implement Browser Push Notifications on your Website?

Implementing Browser Push Notifications on your site is relatively straightforward with a platform like PushEngage. You would need to add the javascript code to your website to go live. Later you can use the dashboard to configure what kind of opt-in popup you want to show your users. Remember, if you have a opt-in process which has the least number of steps, while explaining the purpose of your opt-in you will have a higher rate of subscription.

Remember push notifications require a HTTPS site for subscription, so if you don’t already have one, you can use the subdomain provided by us which is a HTTPS subdomain for you, for subscription and sending messages.

Engage Your Users With Push Notifications

Once you have implemented Web Push Notifications on your website, you would need to think about the campaigns you want to run, to engage your users.The most common ideas are around Breaking News Alerts, or if you publish a key article. Depends on the type of content site, you could be pushing live cricket scores, or sharing daily test preparation material to your users, or sharing about the relevant conference in your industry.You can also drive increased likes on Facebook or get more Twitter followers, or get app downloads by cross-promoting to these users.

Remember to engage with your users on a regular basis, but at the same time avoid being spammy, by sending only relevant and personalized notifications. This is possible by segmenting your users and sending notifications based on their preferences and site actions. It is important to keep your unsubscribe rate lower. The subscription/unsubscription is managed in your browser settings and it is hard to get a unsubscribed user to subscribe again.

Another key point to keep in mind is that when you start building Browser Push subscriber list, it will take some time to build your list. There isn’t a way currently to import your registered users and convert them into a push subscriber, as the opt-in process is explicit per user. But the effort to build the list is worth it, given the ROI.

Summary

Browser Push Notification is a must have additional channel for content sites, and it helps increase traffic/revenue to your site, and improves your repeat visits. This is a channel with higher ROI over email and re-targeting so you must add it to your marketing plan. It requires some effort to understand and use this channel but this is worth your time and effort.

ps: This post originally appeared here, and we are reproducing for benefit of benefit of NASSCOM SIG community members